Category: Education

As student enrollment begins to stabilize at colleges and universities, higher education leaders are focused on supporting equitable access to postsecondary education. Many leaders are turning to technology to address systemic barriers to education by making services more transparent, efficient, and simple for learners and staff. Together with AWS, Highline College’s financial aid department created a key tool that helped eliminate one such barrier.

In 2022, Xavier University of Louisiana (XULA) launched their journey to future-proofing with the cloud. Modernizing the university’s technology was a top priority to help improve the security of the university, improve business continuity, and solve the unique challenges of the university’s location. Working together with AWS and AWS Partners Strata Information Group and VMware, XULA migrated over 90 percent of its critical systems to the cloud, boosted its cybersecurity posture, and reduced IT costs.

AWS announced the availability of Landing Zone Accelerator (LZA) for Education, an industry-specific deployment of the LZA on AWS, designed to further support education customers in designing cloud environments for their compliance needs. The LZA on AWS solution is architected to align with AWS best practices and multiple, global compliance frameworks. The new LZA for Education builds on the LZA to help customers secure their research workloads or workloads containing student data by giving them a set of default configurations that they can use as a starting point and iterate on to define security and compliance posture as code.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies are transforming many industries. But although public sector organizations are realizing the benefits of these technologies, there are many remaining challenges, including biases and a lack of transparency, that limit the wider adoption to unlock the full potential of AI and ML. In this post, learn a high-level framework for how AWS can help you address these challenges and provide better outcomes for constituents.

EdIndia Foundation is an Indian nonprofit organization whose mission is to create innovative solutions that impact the quality of education at scale. EdIndia’s research showed that between the ages of 8–11, there is a stark difference in learning outcomes of students taught by high-performing teachers compared with low-performing teachers. EdIndia saw an opportunity to address this problem using AWS.

Dr. Kevin Leyton-Brown and Neil Newman are computer scientists at the University of British Columbia (UBC) working at the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and microeconomic theory. Their research demands large-scale, high-performance computing, in episodic bursts, to run parallel simulations of complex auctions. When Leyton-Brown and Newman began research into the computationally complex auction theory behind the 2016 United States wireless spectrum auction, their ML models required significantly more computing power than their on-premises infrastructure could provide. The UBC team turned to RONIN, an AWS Partner, and the virtually unlimited infrastructure of the AWS Cloud, to accelerate their time to answers and new discoveries.

The National Institute on Aging Genetics of Alzheimer’s Disease Data Storage Site (NIAGADS DSS), powered by AWS, is a genomic database that provides access to publicly available datasets for Alzheimer’s disease and related neuropathologies. Created to make Alzheimers-genetics knowledge more accessible to researchers, NIAGADS has genomics data on 172,701 samples from 98 datasets and is now 1.3 petabytes (PB) in total size. NIAGADS is creating a system that promotes scientific discovery through data sharing with a large cadre of institutions.

How can leaders transform good ideas into the kinds of services that change lives? That’s the central question of the IMAGINE conference from AWS, a two-day, no-cost event for state and local government and education leaders. From July 11-12, 2023 in Sacramento, CA, leaders from across state and local government and education will gather to learn more about how to transform public services to deliver for students, constituents, and communities. Will we see you there? Register now for the IMAGINE 2023 conference in Sacramento.

Cyber events are unfortunately becoming a common event in higher education. When Hartnell College experienced a cyber event in 2022, they used AWS while working with AWS Partner Ferrilli to recover and rebuild their systems. Based on the lessons learned from Hartnell College’s experience, higher education leaders can explore certain steps to better prevent and prepare against cyber events.

Nonprofit organizations tend to have a lot of data that resides in systems that don’t interact with each other. For organizations in the nonprofit healthcare industry, this problem is made more difficult to manage by the sheer volume of data that they collect. Solving this data unification problem is the reason that Collibra, an AWS Partner, built the Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud. Froedtert and the Medical College of Wisconsin (F&MCW), a nonprofit academic medical center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, uses the Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud on AWS to unify access to diverse datasets to improve patient outcomes.